Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Telebriefing Resources

The Human Microbiome Project (HMP) is an interdisciplinary research effort at the National Institutes of Health that aims to characterize the microbial communities found at several different sites on the human body, including nasal passages, oral cavities, skin, gastrointestinal tract, and the urogenital tract, and analyze the role of these microbes in human health and disease.

In a series of coordinated scientific reports published on June 14, 2012, in Nature and several journals in the Public Library of Science (PLoS), some 200 members of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Consortium from nearly 80 universities and scientific institutions report on five years of research.

Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Resources

Human Microbiome Project: The Broad Institute
The Broad Institute's goals in the HMP were to: generate a comprehensive set of 1,000 reference genomes from organisms comprising the human microbiome; determine whether individuals share a core human microbiome; understand whether changes in the human microbiome can be correlated with changes in human health; and develop new technologies and bioinformatics tools necessary to achieve these goals.

Human Microbiome Project: Baylor College of Medicine
Baylor College of Medicine joined the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the J. Craig Venter Institute to address some early goals of this project. The HMP will rely on metagenomic sample sequencing as a key method for comparisons of microbial communities between individuals, sites, and states (e.g., disease, diet, age). Pilot projects will determine the appropriate sequencing platforms, quality controls, and annotation pipelines for (1) generating reference genomes and (2) sequencing metagenomic samples.

Human Microbiome Project: The Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
The Genome Institute is applying next-generation sequencing technology to analyze human metagenomic samples and the genomes of microorganisms that colonize the human body. A number of projects describing the microbiomes from healthy subjects serve to provide baseline information about the role of bacteria, viruses, and eukaryotic microbes in the body. Other projects characterizing the communities they form in a number of diseases ultimately seek to provide doctors with new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.